In it, I referred to Kemal Ataturk's
"great and passionate" devotion to the creation
of a modern, secular Turkish state. My purpose was to
point out to Muslims that there are secular ways to
achieve a modern state, which need not deny culture while
separating politics from religion.

I did not wish thereby to gloss over
the horrific genocide committed in Turkey during and
after World War I, including during the leadership of
Kemal Ataturk, against citizens whose "fault"
was being Christian Greeks and Armenians living where
they had lived for millennia, in Asia Minor. This
genocide nearly destroyed the Armenian people. The
Turkish State has continued to deny this genocide, thus
inflicting great pain on the remaining survivors and the
descendents of the victims, and maintaining a terrible
blot on the honor of Turkey. It is as if Germany were to
deny the Holocaust. This despite the ironic fact that
Ataturk condemned the murder of Christians in 1926, when
he told the LA Examiner on August 1, 1926:

"These left-overs from the
former Young Turk Party, who should have been made to
account for the millions of our Christian subjects
who were ruthlessly driven en masse, from their homes
and massacred, have been restive under the Republican
rule."

Rather than write about this subject
ourselves, we would like to open our pages to people who
still suffer the pain of these events, the destruction of
the Armenian and Greek communities, whose home was Asia
Minor. By posting documented material on this subject, we
may help inform many people unfamiliar with the events.